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The Black Canary Miniseries That the Longbow Hunters Killed

In Nothing Was Delivered, we look at announced comic book projects that never came about. We'll try to find out WHY they didn't come out. I'm sure you all know tons of examples of comic book projects like these, so feel free to write me at brianc@cbr.com to tell me some for future columns.

Today, we look at a Black Canary miniseries that never came about (but part of it showed up decades later...sort of). I featured this as a Comic Book Legend years ago. The Alan Davis featured image is unrelated. I just needed a good Black Canary image from the 1980s.

It is hard to emphasize just how big of a deal Alan Moore was back in the mid-1980s. It seemed like every comic book he penned, even short back-ups, drew a whole bunch of attention from everyone.

That was definitely the case for a two-part fill-in story that he did for the Green Arrow back-up feature in Detective Comics #549-550, working with artist Klaus Janson.

Titled "Night Olympics," it was a fairly standard piece of Alan Moore deconstruction. Of course, "fairly standard Alan Moore piece of deconstruction" was still mind-blowing for the time, so seeing Green Arrow and Black Canary out for a night patrol in the "real" city, seeing all of the really messed up things that you would see out at night while also commenting on how pathetic the bad guys are nowadays, was a real big deal at the time.

There is also a new villain named simply Pete Lomax. He is a brilliant archer like Green Arrow, but he isn't interested in a super villain name. He'll just be Pete Lomax...

The first issue ends with Pete firing at the two heroes and the next issue sees Green Arrow aghast as Black Canary is shot!

Arrow eventually defeats Lomax...

He then visits Canary in the hospital and they share a moment together...

This more mature approach to their relationship inspired young Greg Weisman, who pitched DC Comics on a Black Canary miniseries that would further explore the relationship between Canary and Green Arrow and would possibly have ended with the two heroes getting engaged.

However, right around this same time, DIFFERENT editors at DC Comics were wooing Mike Grell to do a sort of "Dark Knight Returns for Green Arrow." That was to be the Longbow Hunters, a prestige format miniseries that led to a new Green Arrow ongoing series. The problem, of course, is that Grell's take on Green Arrow and Black Canary specifically did NOT include them getting married. So Weisman's miniseries, which was going to have been penciled by the great veteran DC artist, Mike Sekowsky, was canceled after a full issue had been penciled!

Paul Kupperberg shared four pages of the miniseries on his Facebook page. Go to the next page to see the pages and also learn how Weisman got the last laugh!